Mark Carney Sounds Good to Me

Chantal Hebert writes that "Liberal insiders" are looking at Mark Carney to replace Justin Trudeau.

Carney is due to finish his current gig as governor of the Bank of England at the end of this year. There has long been speculation that he could one day land in the Canadian political arena and that if he did, he would cast his lot with the Liberals.

As the party’s fortunes have declined in the pre-election polls, that speculation has turned into active interest — if not on Carney’s part, at least on that of some of his many fans inside the party. 

On a recent conference call, a group of them discussed how Trudeau’s diminished prospects could result in an early opportunity for Carney to succeed him. 

According to one participant, the group is working on the assumption that Trudeau will be hard-pressed to win more than 140 seats in October.

After a string of duds, including the current leader, Carney sounds like the breath of fresh air the Liberal Party so desperately needs.

Why do I like Carney? Where to start? The governor of the Bank of England knows there's no future in bitumen. Like his predecessor, he's been warning everyone who'll listen that the world economy is resting on a giant IED, also known as the Carbon Bubble. That's a reality no Liberal leader has been able to accept.

Carney knows that climate change is an economy killer, something the current Liberal regime doesn't want to think about.  In a 2018 address, Carney showed that he understands the hurdles to clean energy  and the risks if we botch the effort.

Carney has earned high praise from climate activists. He's been dubbed "the unlikely climate champion."

Carney understands climate change in all its dimensions, especially the fossil energy sector and the risks of "stranded assets" a term for coal and bitumen. He would be a breath of fresh air after the endless litany of carbon stooges in our Parliament and provincial legislatures.

Put simply, Mark Carney has everything that Trudeau lacks and then some. It's time the Liberals ditched Justin, son of Margaret, and got a real leader.

At a moment when Canada, and the world, are at risk from threats unparalleled in the history of human civilization, this country could use somebody clear-headed.

Mark Carney Warns Climate Change Demands Wholesale Change - While There's Still Time.

Canadian Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has joined with Villeroy de Galhau, his counterpart at the Bank of France, to warn the financial community that they can no longer afford to ignore the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change.

They said: “As financial policymakers and prudential supervisors we cannot ignore the obvious physical risks before our eyes. Climate change is a global problem, which requires global solutions, in which the whole financial sector has a central role to play.” 

The warning comes as concern over the impact of climate change and the lack of urgent action is increasing, reflected in the Extinction Rebellion protests and schoolchildren’s strikes across the world. 

The heads of two of the world’s most influential central banks urged other financial regulators around the world to carry out climate change stress tests to spot any risks in the system, while also calling for more collaboration between nations on the issue. They warned that a “massive reallocation of capital” was necessary to prevent global warming above the 2°C maximum target set by the Paris climate agreement, with the banking system required to play a pivotal role.

Wait, there's an idea.  Like roadside breathalyzers, what if we had climate change stress tests for our governments - federal, provincial and municipal? If you think the financial institution scores would be shockingly low, they'd be nothing compared to our political institutions who, although directly responsible for confronting this existential threat pretend to ignore reality for the sake of political expediency. Party over country. Looming elections over the hope of some viable future.

It's like a psychotic Kabuke theatre to watch Ottawa and the "aggrieved" provinces duke it out over a minuscule and grossly ineffective carbon tax. They're not as ignorant as they pretend. They don't care about the future and that means they don't care about us.

Let's see a stress test. Here's an example: In the 2007-2008 Great Recession, the American government had just enough financial resources to staunch the artery before the economy bled out. If it happens today, that critical buffer is gone in the name of "tax reform." This is one of those things that Keven Phillips, patrician Republican insider and author of the 2005 book, "American Theocracy," discusses as one harbinger of the irreversible decline of one global hegemon and the ascendancy of another.

The long and the short of it - any government today that can't pass a political stress test is merely setting us up for a hard, and possibly unsurvivable landing.  Corporations have as much need to survive as we do. Governments, they're not the same.

It's about time we kept scorecards on our political parties and leaders that measured performance against known, understood, and computated threats. I'm not even guessing on this one. They would fail miserably, intolerably.

Our future, the lives of our youngest and generations to follow them, can no longer be entrusted to Trudeau (the compliant) or Scheer (the utterly malevolent). By failing to exploit the ecological advantages that come from such a huge and temperate land with no excess population, they're wilfully leaving us exposed and endangered. That, in my opinion, crosses the line into dereliction.

To me, it's a very ugly pox on both their houses. Trudeau, after seeing Canadians endure Harper, even a Harper false majority, held out hope by promising electoral reform. Then he won his own false majority and, quelle surprise, changed his mind. That was an act of self-interest and an even greater act of betrayal. That rendered the Liberals unfit to govern even if the alternative was worse.

Liberals are already squirming, writing posts that a vote for anyone other than Justin is a vote for Trudeau. Sorry, guys, it didn't have to be that way. Electoral reform would have sorted it all. Now it may cost Trudeau a workable minority government and hand Scheer the reins of power.

Electoral reform would have another critical benefit to Canada and our people. It would give the Green Party a louder and more effective voice in Parliament. Face it, we're trailing in the bottom of the 9th.  Somebody has to speak for the future.

Mark Carney Again Warns of Climate Change Induced Financial Collapse. Is Anyone Listening?

The former governor of the Bank of England said it. The current governor of the Bank of England is saying the same thing - to anyone who'll listen.  Mark Carney who recently left the top perch at the Bank of Canada to sit on the top perch of the Bank of England says, unless we get climate change under control, soon (as in now), we'll enter an era of financial crises and collapsing living standards.

In a speech to the insurance market Lloyd’s of London on Tuesday, Carney said insurers were heavily exposed to climate change risks and that time was running out to deal with global warming.

The governor said that proposals would probably be put to the G20 meeting in Turkey in November urging the world’s leading developed and developing countries to bring in tougher corporate disclosure standards so that investors could better judge climate change risks.

...“The challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come,” Carney said. “The far-sighted amongst you are anticipating broader global impacts on property, migration and political stability, as well as food and water security. So why isn’t more being done to address it?”

...“Climate change is the tragedy of the horizon. We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix.

“The horizon for monetary policy extends out to two to three years. For financial stability it is a bit longer, but typically only to the outer boundaries of the credit cycle – about a decade. In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”

Carney addressed the subject that Canada's political leadership relentlessly avoids mentioning, the looming Carbon Bubble, and the inevitability that high-cost, high-carbon fossil fuels - yes, including bitumen - will become "stranded assets."

“Take, for example, the International Panel on Climate Change’s estimate of a carbon budget that would likely limit global temperature rises to 2 degrees [centigrade] above pre-industrial levels.

“That budget amounts to between a fifth and a third of the world’s proven reserves of oil, gas and coal.  If that estimate is even approximately correct it would render the vast majority of reserves “stranded” – oil, gas and coal that will be literally unusable without expensive carbon-capture technology, which itself alters fossil fuel economics.

So far the best we're getting out of our political leadership are promises of carbon pricing or cap and trade schemes with the revenues handed off to the provinces in one form or another. Nobody is willing to say they'll take that money and keep it in Ottawa's treasury and use it to replace and reinforce our national infrastructure that is already decaying and definitely not Anthropocene-ready.

Our supposed leaders are waiting for market conditions to kill off Athabasca but there's no discussion of who cleans up the mess afterwards, after the foreign oil companies have bugged out.  We're not discussing the enormous environmental hazard that is Athabasca, how we're going to clean it up and at what cost and who'll get stuck with the tab or what awaits Alberta and the rest of Canada if we don't clean it up. These are conversations that come with price tags of hundreds of billions of dollars, definitely not suited for delicate ears wanting to hear only lies about balanced budgets and sunny tomorrows.

OPEC Sees a Bright Future Ahead. Unfortunately, It's Not Yours.

As far as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, is concerned the future looks rosy.  In its latest outlook report, OPEC foresees $177 per barrel oil prices by 2040 and a market that will require an extra 21 million barrels a day over the next 25-years to meet growing demand.

I expect you know what this means.  If they're right, OPEC's future is very bright and yours, well, anything but.  It should, however, be music to the ears of our own Dark Prince, Harper, and his acolytes, Justin the Lesser and Terrible-Tempered Tom.

The findings of the report will come as a blow to climate change campaigners who are warning that unless serious action is taken to reduce green house emissions the world will face a catastrophic global warming shock beyond 2025.

Opec – which currently pumps about a third of the world’s oil – said that after the end of this decade the world will need to find an additional 1m bpd of crude annually through to 2040 when it forecasts that demand will reach 111.1m bpd up from about 90m bpd at current levels.

Although the figure is a slight downward revision from its previous report it highlights the continued dominant role that oil continues to play in the global energy mix despite warnings from the United Nations that urgent action is required to avoid a climate change catastrophe. According to Opec, Asia accounts for 71pc of demand growth in the developing world, with total global energy demand forecast to increase by 60pc through to 2040.

“It is fossil fuels that will continue to play the leading role in satisfying world energy needs in the future,” said Opec secretary general Abdalla Salem el-Badri on the publication of the 367-page report.

This seems to be in keeping with Aussie PM, Tony Abbott's recent pronouncement that "the foundation of the world's energy needs will be coal."

Meanwhile the International Energy Agency, IEA, three years ago gave us this clear warning:

"The world is likely to build so many fossil-fueled power stations, energy guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

"Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this 'lock-in' effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found.  If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.

"'The door is closing,' Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. 'I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety].  The door will be closed forever.'" 

Bear in mind, also, that it was less than a month ago that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, proclaimed that we are in a "carbon bubble" in which most fossil fuel reserves should be treated as "stranded assets."  Carney came to this conclusion on accepting that, if we're to avoid catastrophic climate change, 80 per cent of already known fossil fuel reserves would simply have to be left in the ground, unburned.  

What these messages from Tony Abbott, OPEC, and our own Stephen Harper convey is a subtle but very real declaration of war on the planet, on us and on those who will follow us.  They're not going to back off voluntarily, responsibly.